All That's Left To Chart
by The Key of MGY
Summary: Henry Duncan Spens Goodsir, in Purgatory.
1. Chapter 1

_It'll go after those who are running, at first_ , Captain Crozier had said.

 _If you run, you'll die_ , Sergeant Tozer had said.

And so Harry D.S. Goodsir closed his eyes, drew in a slow breath, and kept still.

But not out of courage, or a sense of self-preservation, or any sort of belief - such as the captain clearly still clung to - that they could survive this. Survive, escape, make it to the safety of Fort Resolution, and thus back home to England. He no longer harbored any such illusions. He no longer cared whether he lived or died. Not since Cornelius Hickey's seditious machinations had resulted in Lady Silence's banishment from Terror Camp, and _certainly_ not since being forced into the role of butcher for that murderous little goblin of a man. His optimism, his hope, and his faith: all of it, drained away like so much blood from an opened vein.

He would not begrudge Crozier his will to survive. He would not hinder Crozier's effort's to do so. But Goodsir was certain, now, that he himself would never leave King William Island alive. He would never set foot on British soil again.

(Lieutenant Hodgson had unknowingly sparked the germ of an idea in Goodsir's mind.

 _If I were a braver man, I'd kill Mr. Hickey, though it would mean my death too_.

He had thought: if he must die here, and be consumed, as he surely would and would be… could he not regain a measure of control over his fate by choosing the time and manner of his passing, and ensuring that Hickey and his men would come to regret making a meal of him in the process? Such an act would go against God, of course. But God, if He truly existed at all, did not deign to shine His light here. Good Christian men were struck down, in all manner of ways too horrible to contemplate. Godless malcontents like Hickey flourished. Keeping one's morals and faith offered no salvation. Was taking your own life still a sin if there was no God to judge you for it?

In the end, whatever divine judgment might have been handed down on him didn't matter; Hickey had elected to send his men on this final death march before Goodsir could act, and his window of opportunity was now closed.)

If given a choice, he would prefer not to meet his end at the claws of the Tuunbaq… but he no longer believed there was a God who gave any kind of damn whatsoever about the things he wished for.

At least Lady Silence was with her people now, and safe from the mortal judgment of his fellow countrymen gone mad. Crozier seemed to genuinely believe that. The reassurance hadn't been given as a hollow platitude.

One bright spot in the endless darkness.

Harry Goodsir opened his eyes.

"It's before me!" Private Pilkington shouted.

"Hold, Private!" Cornelius Hickey barked.

But Crozier and the others cuffed to the heavy metal chain with which they'd been hauling the boat sledge were already moving - (a conversation had been conducted in silence and pointed looks while their caulker's mate had been raging at Queen and Country) - they were jerking the boat what precious few feet forward they could, aiming for Thomas Armitage and the keys at the dead man's waist while the Tuunbaq was occupied with Pilkington - but it wasn't enough to reach them - "Run the chain back, run it back!" Crozier gasped - Tozer and he and Goodsir, cuffed to the opposite end of the chain from Hodgson, duly ran towards the boat while Hodgson used the slack to run forward - there was no _point_ they were going to _die_ but Goodsir _would not begrudge the captain his hope_ \- Des Voeux ran, Diggle ran - "Don't run, _don't run!_ " - Goodsir pressed his back against the side of the boat and, despite himself, wished he could clamp his hands over his ears to shut out the screaming - "Be still!" - " _Stop moving!_ " - first Hodgson, then Robert Golding, both lost to the monster - the chain was jerked sharply forward, and Goodsir's vision blacked out as momentum sent him face-first into the curved bow of the boat -

 _I'll just lie here_ , he thought, looking dizzily up at the pale slate blue of the sky curving above them, the screams now oddly muffled in his ears, hardly feeling the sharp points of the rocks beneath him. _Perfectly still. Not moving. If I die now, then I die. At least this nightmare will be at an end_. He thought he heard the captain shouting his name.

\- a terrible burning pain shooting up the length of his arm, rocks pummeling his body - no, not pummeling, he was being _dragged_ -

\- this must be it, he was going to be set upon despite not moving, but - no, Captain Crozier was still shouting, hardly audible for the deafening roars of the Tuunbaq - dazed and in quite sudden agony, Goodsir tried to gather his wits back about him but the world kept tumbling, the horizon spinning on an axis that looked very much like a bloodied Cornelius Hickey -

\- then the chain jerked at Goodsir's arm again and his vision went black for good.

* * *

When he opened his eyes, it was to find Silence peering down at him.

Well. That settled things. He was _quite_ dead. He was dead, and Silence was appearing to him as… his guide across the River Styx, perhaps. A Beatrice to his Dante. Oh, _please_ say he was ascending to Heaven. Or at least - having lost his faith at the end of his life - being left to make his own ascension through Purgatory, because surely he had already made his walk through all the circles of Hell. (This assumed, of course, that his actions performed as Hickey's captive had not damned him to stay there.) Because why else should she be filling his vision, the most unexpected (and unexpectedly beautiful) of sights? Silence was long gone and meant to be far away. Not here. (Wherever _here_ was.)

Then the pain came crashing back in, and - oh.

 _Oh_.

He _wasn't_ dead. He was _alive_. Still alive, now conscious, and with what felt like a considerable amount of injury to his person.

 _And_ with Silence, in the flesh, as real as the stones imprinting their sharp outlines into his back, relief chasing concern across her features as Goodsir focused his wavering gaze on her.

It was the strongest emotion - save for the desperation and grief at her father's deathbed, and her outburst of anger at Captain Crozier - that he had ever seen her display.

"Silna," he tried to say, only it came out as a croaked rasp of breath through parched lips.

(She had gifted him the secret of her real name, during their month of mutual study on the Erebus, once he'd earned her trust and there was a solid rapport between them. He was _Harry_ ; she was _Silna_. Goodsir had never revealed it to anyone else. Her trust, he felt, was too fragile a thing to risk betraying. Their survival might depend on it. And he had been unable to shake the impression that the knowing of her name had been meant for him and him alone.

A flight of fancy, possibly. But then she had cut out her tongue and rendered that particular mental debate moot. Deliberate or not, she wouldn't be sharing her name with anyone now, or ever again.)

Lady Silence - _Silna_ \- looked aside for a brief moment; Goodsir could both hear and sense a slight movement next to his head. Then something cold and wet was spattering across his lips. _Water_. Just enough to enable him to lick them, and swallow without so much difficulty, and speak. Except… what to say?

 _You're here._

 _Why are you here?_

 _How did you find me? How did you know to come?_

 _Is there_ -

Agony exploded in bursts of white and yellow and black in his vision, and it was a moment before he realized that the scream of pain ringing in his ears had just ripped its way out of his own throat. Silna pulled her hand back from his left shoulder, which she had gently prodded in a questioning sort of way, mildly apologetic. The same sort of touch must have been what brought him back to consciousness. Gritting his teeth against the nausea suddenly roiling in his gut, Goodsir gingerly rolled and shifted his head to the right, trying to get as good a look as possible at the offending shoulder without moving the rest of his body. Even that small amount of movement made him feel as if he'd been trampled by a horse.

His arm was stretched outward, away from his side. That was in keeping with what he could remember before -

 _screams, roars, trying to retrieve the keys to their cuffs, a sound new to his ears and surely dredged from the depths of Hell itself, being jerked off his feet_

\- before everything went dark. The metal cuff was still encircling his wrist; the cuff was still locked to the metal chain. But something about the angle of his open palm was slightly _off_. As if his arm had rotated too far in one direction. Yet he felt no resistance in the affected muscles and ligaments, as he would normally in such a position. Only _pain_.

 _Dislocation_ , he thought, the word floating through his still-dazed mind in fits and starts. _Anterior. A shoulder reduction will be required_.

And nothing for the pain. Oh, God, he was going to pass out again. _Wonderful_.

Yet Goodsir didn't have it within him to feel even the smallest amount of shame at the impending show of weakness he would be putting on in front of Silna. There was no point to it. (Had there been _any_ point to the manner in which he had been taught to behave, in what was expected of him as a man, in how to comport himself as a proper, British, _civilized_ gentleman... if that civilized behavior, surely drilled into every man on this disaster of an expedition from childhood on, had so easily broken down in the face of adversity and crisis?)

"My shoulder," he ground out, looking towards Silna again. She nodded, once. It was evident enough what he was saying. "I - I'll need -"

And, squeezing his eyes shut, Goodsir started worming sideways across the rocks, closing the right angle of his arm and torso inch by torturous inch, so that he might push himself up into a sitting position with his arm already held against his side.

Or, alternatively, have Silna assist him in the endeavour. He had scarcely shifted to press his weight into his right hand, once in position, before he felt _her_ hands grasping at his uninjured shoulder - tugging up, placing a palm flat between his shoulder blades, then leapfrogging both palms down his spine in support until he was, at last, upright. Sweating, trembling in pain, gasping out half-sobs for want of breath, propped against Silna's chest with his head lolling back weakly onto her shoulder, but… upright. She bore his weight with no indication of complaint or impatience, a firm hand at his good elbow, waiting with perfect stillness at his back until his breathing steadied itself.

The shame never manifested itself. There was only gratitude, the faintest sense of comfort, and an underlying joy - _you're here, how can you be here_ \- that might have chipped its way through the cracks in his deadened heart to shine in his eyes and on his face if only he weren't so _tired_.

Silna squeezed his good elbow, then the bad - the first had been a warning, evidently, that still failed to prepare him for the next - and began to palpate her way up towards his shoulder. He allowed her to do so without protest, despite feeling perilously close to losing consciousness again. She seemed to understand both the nature of his injury and how to go about alleviating it, which was... not as surprising as it might have been, once. Her people needed to know how to get by on their own, or in small numbers, here in this harsh and unforgiving environment. Of course that would extend to treating injury and illness.

( _Why_ had they ever thought they could come to the Arctic, a land so foreign to their British sensibilities that it may as well have been the surface of the moon, and conquer it - bend it to their will - without emerging unscathed?)

A dislocated joint might even be as relatively mundane to her as it was to him. At the very least, she certainly didn't seem to be fazed at all. Her calm demeanor was strangely reassuring. But it was still impossible not to go utterly rigid with pain once Silna's questing fingertips reached his shoulder. Goodsir breathed through his nose, and tasted bile on his tongue while spots danced in his vision.

"On - on the count… of three?" he asked. He had taught her numbers in English, through ten. She squeezed his right elbow again, let go, and shifted to lightly grasp his upper left arm with both hands. Good - she understood. ( _Brava_ , he could remember saying to her, what felt so long ago, when she would correctly interpret his English into her own Inuktitut. Simpler times. Happier times.) He squeezed his eyes tightly shut once more, girding himself, and said: "One, two, thr-"

She executed a motion that seemed to both turn and pull his arm all at once. Sickly white flashed against the insides of Goodsir's eyelids before fading to darkest black again.

* * *

Only seconds could have passed in the waking world this time around; he was still sitting up (albeit barely so) when his eyes snapped back open. As before, Silna's face was filling his vision, less obviously concerned now but still quite solemn. She had just slapped him about the cheeks to wake him.

Goodsir drew in a deep, ragged breath and tentatively made to rotate his shoulder. The pain - which was still very much present - flared sharply, then eased into a milder sort of burn, throbbing in time with the beat of his heart. It was difficult, but he managed it. Good. _Good_. The joint had reset properly, then. He would need to be gentle with it for some time, of course. A sling to rest his arm in would be ideal. (No, something for the pain would be _ideal_ , but there was nothing to be done for it. Not now, not here.) (Which then begged the question…

... _what next? What happened now?_ )

"Thank you," he gasped, hugging his arm against his side, and attempted a smile. The expression felt strangely foreign in the way it pulled at his mouth, cobwebbed and rusty. He had not smiled - _truly_ smiled - in a very long time.

Silna looked at him for a moment longer before nodding. Then she got back to her feet. And that was when Goodsir finally saw the prone body of Captain Crozier a few feet away, likewise still cuffed to the metal chain, its length leading to half of Cornelius Hickey and a _very_ dead Tuunbaq.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry Goodsir said nothing. He simply stared.

The Tuunbaq was lying on its side. The pale eyes were open but sightless in an impossibly _human_ face, bloody mouth gone slack. Its body was riddled with old wounds incurred during previous encounters with the expedition: a great patch of poorly-healed skin where the fur had burned away and never grown back, what could be either the entry or exit wound for Lieutenant Hodgson's cannon shot, at least half a dozen visible bullet pockmarks over the protruding ribs. And it appeared to have vomited up a mass of indescribable gore immediately before or upon expiring, which now looked well on its way to drying out.

(Just how long had he spent lying here, unconscious, for the viscera to no longer be fresh? _Hours?_ )

Cornelius Hickey - or what was left of him - lay face-down in front of the beast. Half of a forearm and _everything_ from mid-trunk down had very obviously either been consumed or ripped off by the Tuunbaq. There was simply no other possible explanation for the state of the man's body. Goodsir could only assume that Hickey had made his attempt to parley with the creature, perhaps even assert control over it, and then paid very dearly for his hubris.

Neither sight was particularly satisfying.

How strange.

(He had been so resigned to his imminent death. He had even been prepared to welcome it, after a fashion. So the fact that _they_ were dead and _he_ was not was almost... a disappointment.)

Very slowly, Goodsir slid his gaze to the right.

There was Thomas Armitage some distance away, still on his back where he'd fallen, body mercifully unmolested. Private Pilkington, near an outcropping of rock; a haphazard arrangement of limbs and clothing that could only be Lieutenant Hodgson. Just past him, Sergeant Tozer, like Hickey face-down but more importantly _free of his cuffs_. The rush to liberate the keys from Armitage had succeeded, then, but only - it seemed - up to a point. Captain Crozier was still shackled to the chain. Where were the keys now?

Goodsir shifted his gaze to the left.

A trail of blood led to Magnus Manson's body. Not fay beyond lay John Diggle. There was no sign of Samuel Crispe, Charles des Voeux, or Robert Golding. Edmund Hoar, of course, had run off even before the Tuunbaq was upon them.

All of them, dead.

Dead, or missing and surely dead before long.

The faint disappointment curling its tendrils around his deadened heart began to give way to a creeping emptiness.

(Where were the other remaining survivors of the expedition? What had become of them? Lieutenant Little had never arrived with a rescue party, as Crozier expected of him. Perhaps there had been yet another mutiny. Perhaps they had elected to continue on south instead, rather than risk precious time, energy, and ammunition tangling with Hickey's group. Perhaps they were dead now, too. Perhaps he - Goodsir - was the only one left alive. The last man standing, out of the one hundred and twenty-nine souls who had set sail from Greenhithe three years ago.)

With an effort, he returned his attention to Silna, as she knelt next to Crozier. At first glance, the other man appeared to be free of serious injury. Unlike the others, there was no immediate cause of death to be seen. But then Goodsir caught a glimpse of his blood-soaked shirt collar. It hadn't been so, before. And when Silna moved to press her hand to Crozier's chest after touching his cheek for a long moment, evidently assessing a wound the way she had done his own, he realized: _He too is still alive_. _I am not alone._

 _You were already not alone._

 _For a moment, I felt very much so._

 _Go help Silna_. _The captain needs a doctor. In that, you_ _**are**_ _the only one left alive._

And then: _If ever I was a doctor, I am one no longer._

Perhaps that was true. (It _was_ true, no matter what Crozier thought or said otherwise. Not after what he had been made to do to William Gibson.) ( _William Gibson's body_.) (The distinction didn't matter.) Yet he still found himself unable to sit idly by while a fellow man was suffering. If Crozier was not yet beyond help, Goodsir would do everything within his power to save him. Even now, here at the end of things, when his own hopes for survival were gone, when he would much rather die than continue to live, and he no longer had any right to call himself a healer.

He made to get his feet beneath him and stand, but Silna — hearing the scrape of leather on stone — looked back at him and held her hand out, as if to ward him off.

 _Keep still_ , she seemed to be saying. _You're injured._

Goodsir paused for only a moment before electing to pay her no heed. He was in pain, yes, but still perfectly ambulatory. Neither of his legs were injured. —though he very nearly revised that assessment, as he pushed himself to his feet with his good arm and _every_ joint, ligament, and muscle in his body made their various complaints known. He had, obviously, never actually been trampled by a horse and carriage. But the analogy still seemed to be a wholly apt one. If he hadn't transformed into one enormous full-body bruise by day's end, he would be quite surprised.

Silna gave him a mildly reproachful look as he joined her at Crozier's side. (A mere narrowing of the eyes, nearly imperceptible, but Goodsir had spent enough time in her company that he felt he could now interpret such flashes of emotion with reasonable accuracy.) He ignored it and reached out to pluck at the bloody fabric of Crozier's shirt, peeling it away and open as best he could with his cuffed hand. Thankfully, the nature of the injury was almost immediately apparent, and further removal of clothing was unnecessary: there were two long, parallel slashes across the captain's upper chest, sluggishly oozing blood. Goodsir would venture a guess that he had caught a glancing blow from one of the Tuunbaq's mighty paws. Glancing, but still powerful enough to effect serious harm - the slashes were deep, and the slightest difference in placement or angle could have opened the jugular vein, the carotid artery, or even the trachea. Crozier was exceedingly fortunate to not have died almost instantly.

 _Are either of us really so fortunate_ , Goodsir thought, as he gingerly sat back on his heels.

(He had never been like this before. _Before_ , he had been full of optimism and hope and a frankly embarrassing amount of naivete. He had managed to hold on to those qualities for far longer than some of his fellows. But the past handful of weeks had burned them out. All light, all hope, all innocence: all taken away from him, piece by piece, until he had nothing left.

Or so he had thought. So he had _believed_.

And yet Silna was next to him now as if she had never been forced to leave.)

"He needs medical attention," Goodsir said, voice rasping again; he swallowed to wet his throat and continued, meeting Silna's eyes. "A doctor."

No, he wasn't slighting himself, not this time. _Doctor_ was one of the first English words he had taught her. She would understand what his saying it now meant.

"We made camp, a… a camp…" The world was still spinning, but very slowly now. Words kept slipping away from him. What was it _she_ had taught _him_ , her word for their encampment on the ice? He couldn't remember. Something simpler… " _Tupiq_." Tent. That would do. And he made to point in the direction they had come, but his wrist caught on its cuff and suddenly the attached boat chain was dragging his arm down. He didn't have the strength to raise it. Silna, following the aborted gesture, caught his hand in both of hers and lightly rattled the cuff, looking back at him with a question in her eyes.

 _How do I free you?_

Keys. Where were the keys. Tozer was free of his cuffs, but Crozier was not; one or the other must have dropped them. They would still be nearby. "Keys," he said out loud, even as he began to look around - then he saw Tozer and Hodgson again, and swiftly dropped his gaze to his knees as his gut lurched.

( _Too much blood_. Goodsir had never been particularly bothered by the sight of it; he had a strong stomach, and his endless curiosity over all things scientific had always won out over whatever squeamishness he might have once felt. But not anymore. Now he was thoroughly tired of the sight, the smell, the feel. He would be quite happy to never see a drop of the stuff ever again.)

How to explain to Silna, who had no knowledge of keys _or_ locks? Gently, he pulled his cuffed hand back, and carefully mimed inserting an object into the lock and turning it, as best he could while keeping his left arm still. She watched his movements intently.

"Keys. They will fit here… do you see?" Goodsir twisted an imaginary key with his fingers again, then winced as his shoulder gave a sharper throb of pain. "Like so. Metal. Three or four, on a ring…"

Silna was already looking about, keen eyes searching the pale wash of the rocks surrounding them; Goodsir wasn't at all certain that he had managed to make any sense, but he trusted that she would recognize anything she _didn't_ recognize and fetch it over accordingly. Whatever else the other men on the expedition had thought of her intellect - and they frequently weren't complimentary of it - _he_ knew that she was actually quite perceptive. What she didn't immediately understand, she was quick to intuit. An uncivilized savage she might be by British standards, yet she had a greater capacity for learning than not a few of his fellows at university.

(Edinburgh, with its University and his home at 21 Lothian Street, could not have felt farther away than it did now while he sat here, lost in a literally uncharted land many hundreds of miles away from the barest speck of refined civilization.)

Goodsir didn't realize he had fallen into a daze of a reverie until the noise caused by Silna jumping to her feet yanked him out of it; he blinked, and suddenly she was hurrying past him towards the boat sledge. He shook his head slightly in an attempt to clear it. The pain in his shoulder seemed to be trickling its way into the rest of his body, evening out into one all-encompassing ache and producing a low drone in his ears, and he didn't think he had ever felt so exhausted in his life. Crozier, still quite insensible, wavered and blurred for a moment before coming back into focus. Goodsir blinked again, and looked up at Silna as she reappeared at his side. With a jolt of unexpected pleasure, he saw she was holding the ring of keys.

(The pleasure was more reminiscent of a teacher's pride in a student. The _relief_ it ought to have been was entirely absent.)

She went through three of the four keys, inexpertly fitting them into the lock, before the twist of her fingers followed through with a click and the cuff fell open. Goodsir watched as she moved on to Crozier, tugging the other man's wrist free of its bonds, and still the relief failed to materialize.

He was free. He was safe. Both he _and_ Crozier were free. They were _both_ safe now.

Weren't they?

The Tuunbaq was no longer pursuing them. Hickey was no longer a threat to kill and eat them. They would return to the camp, he would see to Crozier's wounds and tend to himself, and when the captain awoke… then what?

Attempt to rejoin what was left of the expedition? Thank Silna and urge her to return to the safety of her own people - again - and say their goodbyes - again? She couldn't come with them. And even if she _could_ , why on Earth would she even _want to_ , after all the misfortune they had caused her? Her father, dead; her friends, dead. Her ability to speak, gone.

( _ **Why**_ _was she here?_ _ **How**_ _had she found them?_ _ **How**_ _had she known to come?_ )

The three of them staying together did not occur to him at all. They came from two different worlds. They should never have met, and it was very evident to him now that - no matter how much he had wished and worked for otherwise - their two worlds could not co-exist.

Silna went to the sled she had left behind on approach to the Tuunbaq. Harry Goodsir sat on the rocks next to Francis Crozier, looking ahead to the future, and seeing only emptiness and death on the horizon.


	3. Chapter 3

Silna would not allow him to help her transfer Captain Crozier to her sled. Every time Goodsir made a move to try, she subtly angled her body to block him, giving him a hard look as she did so.

 _You are injured_ , he imagined her saying - the light notes of her voice speaking English in his head as easily as she had once spoken her own language out loud - _you need to keep your arm held still. I am perfectly capable of performing this task on my own. Please let me work._

It wasn't as if he doubted that she could. Silna was the most capable woman he had ever met — one of the most capable of either sex, in fact. Probably, she never needed assistance with anything. He just felt utterly useless, standing there in the epicenter of a massacre, hugging his injured arm to his chest while the wind whistled in his ears, watching her carefully lash Crozier down onto the sled and cover him with furs, with only his own thoughts to converse with.

Perhaps that was why he imagined Silna speaking to him in English, despite knowing perfectly well that she couldn't, both before and after the loss of her tongue. He wanted nothing to do with his own thoughts.

 _You have betrayed your beliefs and your morals. Your faith has all been for naught. You are going to die here, and your loved ones will never know what became of you_.

Echoing in his head. Over and over and over.

He ought to have stayed in Edinburgh, with his brothers and his museum conservatorship. He could have done good work there, important work, without ever leaving Scotland. If only the lure of new discoveries amongst the Arctic crustaceans had been less appealing to his ambitions as a naturalist…

And to think that his greatest concern upon setting sail had been the willingness of his fellow officers aboard the _Erebus_ to assist him in his specimen collecting. It was almost enough to make Goodsir break out into a fit of bitter laughter. _Almost_.

Silna glanced at him as if he had done so anyway, brow knitting faintly. He pretended not to notice.

* * *

She also did not allow him to help pull the sled, gently pushing his hand away when he attempted to take hold of the rope next to her and, again, giving him a steady look of dismissal until he relented. And so they descended the hill, down to the camp, in companionable silence.

(Or companionable enough, anyway. Goodsir doubted they would have conversed in the first place - they both had their own concerns to be preoccupied with at the moment - but the option to do so if they wished would have been... nice.)

(Truth be told, he missed the sound of her voice.)

Silna stopped them in the middle of the camp, pausing for a moment to take stock of their surroundings; then, after a glance back at their patient to ascertain he was still secure on the sled, she made directly for the largest tent of the group. Goodsir didn't follow. Instead, he watched as she pulled both sled and Crozier through the unsecured flap, uncertainty settling low in his gut. He had assumed they were bringing the captain here, but only for as long as it took him to gather some supplies before moving on. Didn't Silna have a camp of her own - with her people, even? Why wasn't she taking them there?

She reappeared at the entrance to the tent, looking about and, when she saw Goodsir still standing where she had left him, tilted her head as if asking _Aren't you coming?_

He swallowed once, hard, and made himself look squarely at the tent. _His_ tent. He didn't want to set foot in there again. Didn't want to pass by the makeshift table upon which he'd cut apart William Gibson, or look at the medicine chest he had been forced to carry with him as he'd been kidnapped from Terror Camp, and considered ingesting the contents of to escape his waking nightmare. He didn't want to see the cot he had spent three months sleeping on (or, more frequently, _not_ sleeping on), always wondering if _this_ was to be his last night alive, or if _this_ was to be the day Hickey decided his services as a doctor and butcher were no longer needed. But he couldn't explain any of that to Silna. He didn't know her words for it all, and she wouldn't understand his.

Oh, for heaven's sake. It was just a tent. Made of the same materials as the others. Offering the same amount of protection from the elements as the others. It didn't matter which one Silna chose for Crozier's sick bed. It _didn't_. Truly, it didn't.

(Except it did.)

With a sigh, Goodsir forced his feet to move forward, and went to join them.

Everything was just as he had left it, of course. Cot, tables, medicine chest, assorted instruments that were, ultimately, an unnecessary weight to have dragged along on their trek south. Silna was already undoing the ropes holding Crozier in place on the sled. There was no room in the small space to edge around her and straighten the cot, and when he knelt to assist her she waved him back, so Goodsir - now feeling weary to the very marrow of his bones and really rather numb from it - found himself doing nothing, watching her in silence yet again.

Useless. Helpless and useless.

" _There's nothing more natural than pulling weight, Doctor Goodsir."_

He looked at his shoulder bags, folded on top of an upturned box next to the drawn-back curtain separating the tent into two spaces - the same ones he'd carried since joining Lieutenant Gore's party to search for leads in the ice, a thousand years ago. Or so it seemed.

" _Watch Morfin here in front, and me, at the corner of your eye. Match our strides. You'll take to it - I know you will."_

He looked at the bags and thought of Graham Gore, dead only a little more than a year now instead of a thousand; thought of what a kind and cheerful soul he had been; thought of how the lieutenant hadn't laughed at him, not even once, when he'd insisted on pulling his weight with the sledge and failed miserably.

He thought too of John Morfin: quiet, steadfast Morfin, his slow descent into agony, begging to die, and his brains blown out on the rocks.

Useless then. Still useless today.

" _You call me 'doctor', but technically I'm just a surgeon. Anatomist, in fact."_

" _That's a doctor in my book."_

What would Gore think of him now, he wondered. Would he still have the same utterly unfounded confidence in him? Would he still consider him worthy of the title _doctor_?

Whatever the man _might_ have thought… it didn't matter. Graham Gore wasn't thinking anything about anyone, and he hadn't for a very long time.

Goodsir considered him incredibly fortunate, in that regard.

( _Are either of us really so fortunate?_ )

* * *

It took some time to get Crozier settled on the cot, and towards some semblance of comfortable. The captain drifted back to consciousness a few times - most of them while Goodsir was attempting to clean his wounds (aided by a torn strip of nightshirt and water from Silna's canteen) - but never far enough to be cognizant of his surroundings, and never for very long. Goodsir would have liked to close up the slashing cuts before bandaging them, but lacked the necessary needle and surgical thread. This meant, of course, that the wounds would have to close on their own. Crozier would need to be kept as still as possible to avoid re-opening them. Which also meant he would be in no condition to travel for a while. Ergo: this camp was going to be Goodsir's home, again, for the foreseeable future.

Silna's, as well, if she stayed.

(Would she? Despite having every reason in the world to abandon him and Crozier to their ultimate fate, and he wouldn't have it within him to judge her for it if she did. But surely she wouldn't. She already hadn't.)

She had busied herself with clearing the odds and ends out of the tent proper while Goodsir was tending to Crozier, but seeing that he was more or less finished with what he could do for the time being, rejoined him at Crozier's side.

"He should live," Goodsir said quietly, attempting a smile to convey that the prognosis was a good one; his lips twitched, but the expression didn't quite make it fully onto his face. "Provided infection does not set in."

Really, it was sort of pointless, speaking to her in English, wasn't it? And yet he still continued to do it. It just seemed… polite. He could hardly ignore her presence when he didn't know the Inuktitut words for what needed saying (which was often) and besides, she seemed to understand well enough as long as he didn't ramble. That perceptiveness of hers, coming into play. It almost verged on uncanny at times.

Like now - she nodded slightly, and turned to consider Crozier. What she saw evidently satisfied her; turning back to Goodsir, she caught his gaze, held it for a long moment, then reached out and tugged at his waistcoat.

He frowned, not comprehending.

Without breaking eye contact, Silna touched light fingertips to his injured shoulder, then pulled at his waistcoat a little more insistently - this time with both hands.

Oh. She wanted to inspect his shoulder. Sans clothing. Was he interpreting her correctly?

"That isn't necessary," he said, the faintest hint of awkwardness creeping into his voice as he put his hand over hers to gently push them away. (She couldn't see him in a state of undress. It wouldn't be proper.) (As if what was _proper_ in jolly old England held any meaning here. If it ever had at all, it certainly didn't now.) "I don't require a doctor."

Silna shook her head in the negative, her face taking on the same hard look it had worn when she'd insisted that he allow her to load Crozier onto the sled on her own, and placed her hands back on his waistcoat. Then they proceeded to stare at each other in a silent battle of wills that lasted only a few seconds at most, but felt like a small eternity to Goodsir. (He was tired. And _tired_.) With another sigh, he relented, dropping his gaze to his knees and giving the barest nod of assent. Maybe, when she was done, he could finally _rest_. At least for a little while. Lie down and close his eyes and not dread having to open them again.

 _Lie down, close his eyes, and never_ _ **get up**_ _again._

It wasn't so terrible a thought, all things considered. His limbs certainly felt heavy enough to keep him down indefinitely, once Silna pushed him into that position, as Goodsir had the distinct impression she was going to do. She seemed determined to take charge of his care now, as he had once done for her. Having their roles reversed was a little odd - he was accustomed to being the one doing the caring for. It came with the territory of being a medical student, qualifying as a surgeon, signing on as the assistant for a Discovery Service expedition. But now there was no one left to care for, except -

A jolt of pain in his shoulder jerked him out of his mental wandering. Silna had taken his upper left arm gently in one hand and was attempting to slide it from both of the waistcoats he was wearing at once; she'd already managed to free his right arm without his even noticing. (He _really_ needed to stop stewing in his thoughts, if it was pulling him so far away from reality.) (Among other reasons.) Goodsir took a deep breath and allowed her to turn his arm as she wished, squeezing his eyes shut against the latent pain and accompanying nausea, as if he were no more than a life-sized doll incapable of his own movements. He kept them shut while she pulled down his suspenders - there was a surprising amount of relief in having even that little amount of pressure gone from his shoulder - took her time in undoing the small buttons on his shirt, and gripped the fabric in both hands to pull it up and out from his trousers.

(Being cared for, being undressed. It had been a very, _very_ long time since anyone had done those things for him. And Silna, though brisk of demeanor, was still managing to be exceedingly gentle in her task. It was a gentleness that seemed utterly out of place in this camp - this very tent - where so much horror had come to pass.

The backs of Goodsir's eyelids were burning. His lungs were beginning to burn. And so was his throat. Not just his hurt shoulder and arm, now.)

A burst of tiny ripping sensations spread across his back as the fabric of his shirt was lifted away from his skin, and he realized he must have suffered some abrasions as a consequence of being dragged over the rocks. Not as relatively unscathed as he'd first thought, then. He couldn't help but catch his breath in a wince; he sensed Silna pause, then resume working his shirt off over his head. Thank goodness for voluminous sleeves, and shirts like billowy clouds. He hardly needed to maneuver his arms at all in order for her to remove the thing.

And then his back was prickling with discomfort and exposure both, as the air hit his bare skin.

Goodsir didn't open his eyes. He merely sat there, a puppet with its strings cut, waiting to be attended to.

There was the faint rustling sound of fur against canvas as Silna shifted around to sit at his side; fingertips brushed over his ribs, and he involuntarily flinched before reminding himself to breathe. The fingertips danced up and across the span of his shoulder blades, pressing in briefly at seemingly random points, sometimes leaving the impression of stinging pinpricks in their wake but more often punching holes straight through his thoracic cavity. -of course not _actually_ punching holes, but damn if the pain wasn't there in his chest anyway, and suddenly he had never felt so utterly _naked_ in his entire life. When was the last time he had been touched with such deliberate care? He couldn't remember.

(No. He _could_ remember. The same hand, fingers curling over the same shoulder she'd just set back in its joint; the same hand, placed lightly on his chest in reassurance as they parted ways forever.) (Except _not_ forever.) (But it hadn't been on _skin_ before. He hadn't known then just how _delicate_ her hands felt, in spite of the calluses and patches of roughness on them. It was - it was stabbing knives through the cracks in his deadened heart -)

With his eyes squeezed shut against the pressure building behind them, he was completely unprepared for the touch to his cheek: light, inquisitive, prepared to pull back at the first sign of discomfort. He flinched again, a faint twitch of muscle beneath Silna's fingertips; then he stiffened in surprise; and then - with a distant, shallow twinge of dismay at his continued failings as a man - he found himself _leaning into the touch_. Transforming it into a caress, as he turned his cheek into the palm of her hand; exhaling a shuddering breath; coming to the realization that he was trembling all over, and it was _tears_ burning at his eyes -

\- _oh, no, you can't do this, you have to keep yourself held together, the men can't see you falter this way_ -

\- _**there aren't any men left**_ -

For a frozen eternity of a moment, Silna didn't move. Then Goodsir sensed her shifting in place, the fur of her parka brushing and pressing against his bare arm, as the hand on his cheek slid down to the base of his neck. Her other hand suddenly landed square in the center of his chest, lightly, but the small spot of warmth from her palm was still akin to having a brand applied directly to his sternum.

His trembling intensified.

Slowly, almost hesitantly, as if he were a wild animal in danger of spooking, she touched her forehead to his temple.

His breath hiccuped.

Just as slowly, she adjusted the tilt of her face in what felt very much like the lightest of nuzzles at his cheek, and went still.

He could feel her breath ghosting over the untrimmed riot of his beard, and the heat of her lips very close by. Her face was warm next to his. Her hands on his chest and back seemed to be exuding a strange kind of electricity, trickling through the meat of his muscles into his vascular and nervous systems, sparking feeling back into the cellular matter at the very core of his body. And all without a hint of the sexual. He was in a state of half-undress, a woman's hands were on him, _for the first time in his life_ , and he did not feel even the tiniest frisson of sexual interest. He just felt… he felt…

...cared for? _Loved_ , even? In a wholly innocent way, the sort of love one feels for a close friend, but made all the more significant for the fact that Silna, by rights, ought to be repulsed by him. His fellows had killed her father. Murdered her friends. Kidnapped her and very nearly subjected her to mob 'justice' for the deaths of _their_ friends. He didn't deserve her trust _or_ her regard. Yet, somehow, he had earned the former. And she was freely giving the latter. Offering him what comfort she could with her mere presence, because it was all she _had_ to give.

Perhaps she thought it was very scant comfort, and had decided that a little was better than none at all. But it wasn't. Dear God that he had lost all faith in, it was _so much more_.

Almost before he was even aware of what he was doing, Goodsir turned his face towards Silna's, touching their foreheads together and briefly sliding his nose alongside hers in a nuzzle of his own, exhaling raggedly. Then comprehension caught up to action - and it was as if his cheeks had just caught fire - but Silna didn't flinch, pull away, or otherwise react negatively at all. If anything, he was almost certain she moved a millimeter _closer_ when she touched the tip of her nose to his cheek again.

He lost track of how long they sat there in such fashion: a lovers' embrace, in the most platonic sense of the term, and in its own way far more intimate than if their relationship _had_ been a sexual one. He did not allow himself to drift off into the mire of his own thoughts again. It was easier to stay anchored in the present when he had the twin points of Silna's hands, warm on his skin, to focus his attention on, and the rhythm of her breathing to match his own to. At the very least, it was long enough for his trembling to subside, and the ache in his lungs and throat to ease, but not so long as to become uncomfortable. When Silna finally - still gently - pulled her hands back and straightened up, Goodsir reluctantly opened his eyes to meet hers in wordless thanks, and found his lashes were wet.

He'd had no idea that he had been weeping. Funny. He had thought himself beyond shedding tears by now. (Tears of pain, no. Tears of sheer emotion? Most emphatically _yes_.)

Silna held his gaze without blinking, eyes traveling over his face as if assessing the state of his mental condition, for a full minute. Goodsir granted her the respect of not looking away, though he badly wanted to. (She could _see_ him, he thought. Not as who he presented himself to be, but as who - and what - he really was. The impression was a disconcerting one.) Then she nodded almost imperceptibly and reached over to collect what remained of his nightshirt. Turning the fabric this way and that, she considered its shape from several angles, picked one, and gestured for Goodsir to bend his left elbow so she could begin to wrap it.

So she _did_ understand how to best treat a dislocated shoulder. But why would she want to set his arm in a sling before he had got his shirt - at bare minimum - back on? He was well broken out in gooseflesh, especially now that she had moved out of his personal space, and the temperature would only drop further when night fell.

"Silna?" he asked, at a loss for how else to inquire after what she was doing.

She glanced at him, as she tied the ends of the improvised sling in a knot behind his neck.

He waved vaguely at his own torso with his free hand. "My shirt…?"

Shaking her head, she got to her feet and went to pick up one of the furs from her sled, which she had placed aside on the makeshift table opposite of the medicine chest. Goodsir also stood and took a small step back, out of the way, as she spread it out on the tent floor like a rug. Then she collected the second fur and laid it down on top of the first; kneeling to smooth it out, she caught his eye again and nodded towards it.

Sit down? Or… oh, what was _sleep_ in Inuktitut. It was one of the basic human needs. Surely they had taught each other the respective words. But hers wasn't coming to mind. _Sini_ … no, _hini_ … _hinik_ … _hinik_ -something. It ought to be in his dictionary. His dictionary, incredibly, had come with him from Terror Camp. But it was also in the medicine chest, which he still didn't want to open. He would have to hope _she_ remembered _his_ word.

"Sleep?" he asked, pointing at the furs.

Silna paused, then nodded again.

(There was that teacher's pride in a well-learned student, pricking at his carbonized heart.)

Goodsir dutifully eased himself down onto what he now understood to be a sleeping pallet and began the awkward process of wrangling his sea boots off with only one hand. Daylight was still peeking through the gaps in the tent walls, but he was opting not to question her motives. Not anymore. Not with the stubbornness she had displayed thus far in bending him to her will. And not that doing so was particularly difficult at the moment. (Not that it had _ever_ been particularly difficult for her to do, now that he thought on it.) If she wanted him to sleep, then he would sleep. She would hear no arguments from him. There really wasn't anything else he wanted to do, anyway. And maybe, just maybe, he could take the sense memory of the warmth of her hands, her forehead pressed to his, with him into unconsciousness and _not dream a hellscape of nightmares_.

Or - maybe it need not be sense memory. If Silna had planned to attend to any other matters before sundown, it seemed she was abandoning all of them for the time being, because while he'd been removing his boots _she_ had been removing her furred outer layers. The parka, she had folded up and set by where his head would lie, clearly for use as a pillow; the folded pants she set aside for herself.

 _Maybe_ , he could forget all about avoiding a hellscape of nightmares and simply go straight to hell itself. _Because_ , after her furs were discarded and she went to tie the tent flap closed, _she continued right on with removing the rest of her clothing_.

The instant he realized what she was doing, Goodsir very nearly gave himself a bad case of whiplash turning his head quickly in the opposite direction, lest he catch a glimpse of something he really, _really_ shouldn't.

Right. Never mind _his_ being in a state of undress in _her_ presence, and how improper it was; _this_ was _infinitely_ more improper. Improper in the extreme. Entire _leagues_ of impropriety. But _Silna_ didn't know that. As a matter of fact, she probably wasn't even giving it a second thought, if the accounts of Esqimaux life in the _Erebus_ 's library were to be believed. She was merely settling down to sleep as she normally would - and surely had done, ever since leaving the expedition for the second time. And she was going about it in such a businesslike manner that ulterior motives were obviously not on her mind. Possibly, this was a sign of her trust and degree of comfort with him, if she was behaving as she would with her own people. _Possibly_. But instead of feeling pleased, he was only feeling distinctly _flushed_.

(But still not with any degree of arousal. Good heavens, no.)

(Honestly, this was a little bit hilarious. The strongest emotions he'd felt in months, all in the space of a few hours, and they just had to be varying shades of embarrassment. Not relief, not renewed hope, not happiness. Not even renewed despair. _Embarrassment_.)

Keeping his face turned away from Silna, Goodsir pulled up his stocking feet to get them beneath the fur blanket and slowly slid down onto his back, being mindful of his arm in its sling. Only when he was was settled and could very firmly close his eyes did he let his head drop onto the folded parka. Then he very slowly exhaled. The fur beneath him hadn't appeared to be a thick one, but it was surprisingly comfortable, given that it was all between him, the meager layer of tent canvas, and the rocks. The fur above him had the weight he would naturally attribute to a large animal skin, but it didn't put a suffocating sort of pressure on his body. The parka made for a more than adequate pillow. By far, it was all the _softest_ material he had come in contact with for years. Already, he could feel the exhaustion in his bones seeping away with the unexpected level of comfort, and he imagined an oily pool of it, slowly spreading out beneath him and soaking into the canvas floor.

Then he sensed Silna crawling up to slip beneath the fur next to him, and held himself very still, as if by doing so he could somehow escape the fact that she was nude and they were sharing a bed.

(Last time had been different. _Last time_ , they had both been fully clothed. _Last time_ , it had been an act of kindness on her part, meant to calm and soothe. _This time_ was -

\- what _was_ it?

Necessity?

Or -)

Goodsir was aware of her curling up on her side, keeping a modicum of space between them, close enough to share body heat but not close enough that their bodies touched. Then he felt her shift very slightly, and suddenly the warmth of her hand came to rest over his upper arm.

He couldn't help it; he opened his eyes and, after a beat of hesitation, looked carefully to his right. There was nothing untoward to be seen now that she was covered by the fur blanket, of course. And no eyes to meet, either - she was tucking her face against his shoulder. Another point of human touch to go alongside her hand, just as she given him mere minutes ago, but meant to last longer this time. _This time_ was no less innocent in intent than _last time_ , only much more intimate. Embarrassingly, _reassuringly_ intimate. Comfort, regard, and trust: freely given, expecting nothing in return.

 _You are safe here_ , he imagined her saying - could all but actually _hear_ her saying, in the touch of her hand and the stir of her breath on his skin. _You are not alone. You need not be afraid any longer_.

 _I was never afraid_ , he would reply. _Not for myself. I was afraid for you_.

 _Don't be afraid for me, Harry Goodsir_. Now he was indulging in flights of fancy again. _Rest. Go to sleep_.

He slowly inhaled, felt a few strands of her hair tickle at his nose, and closed his eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

Harry Goodsir did not dream of hellscapes and nightmares. Instead, he dreamed he was standing in the road outside his flat on Lothian Street. It was an uncommonly beautiful day, with not a cloud to be seen in the sky above, and only a light breeze tugging at his hair. Silna was next to him, taking in their surroundings with wide eyes. Despite the incongruity of her clothing - what Goodsir thought of as her summer parka, the smooth-skinned layer she wore beneath the furred outer parka - none of the passersby seemed to take any notice of her.

"Is this England?" she asked, as she turned in a slow circle.

"Even better," he replied proudly. Stuffing his hands in his coat pockets, he rocked once on the balls of his feet and beamed at her. "This is Scotland. Edinburgh, to be precise. My home."

And how good it was to be home, he thought, drawing in a deep lungful of Scottish air and exhaling it with satisfaction. How he had missed it here: the cozy rooms he shared with his brother John and friends Edward and George, the banter and camaraderie around the hearth, being surrounded by brilliant minds of all fields. His work as conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh had not been without its share of difficulties and annoyances, but such was the lot for any man of science these days; you accepted that funding would always, inevitably, be funnelled elsewhere and continued on with your endeavours as best you could. None of it made him love the city itself any less. He had been happy here. And he was quite excited to show it off to Silna - to prove to her that his homeland wasn't such a terrible place, that there _were_ good people here.

"Edinburgh," she repeated, carefully, working through the unfamiliar syllables with a slight narrowing of the eyes. "All of this is your home?"

It was clear that she had no frame of reference for putting everything that surrounded them into context. The pavement beneath their feet, the tenements rising four storeys high on either side of the narrow little street, the shops with their wares in the windows on the ground floor - none of it was within her realm of experience.

(Funny, how she could speak the English language so fluently, and understand him perfectly well, yet have no working knowledge of what many of the words she used actually _meant_.)

"Not quite. I live here." Goodsir removed his hands from his pockets and gestured to the door marked _21_. "You've got to climb a few flights of stairs first - we have half the top storey, there's a lovely view of Holyrood Park..."

Silna had moved to approach the door, and was very slowly pressing her palm to the bricks on one side of it, eyes following the pattern of mortar between them up the building's front. After a moment, she pulled her hand back, and rubbed her fingertips over her palm, as if studying the texture of the grit deposited there. Then she turned around to look at him. "You do not move with the seasons?"

"No," he replied. "It isn't necessary to, not here. Our shelters are permanent; they're built to withstand all the seasons. We haven't got to hunt to survive. Do you see, just down there?" And he went to lightly take Silna's elbow and turn her in the direction he was pointing. "That's a butcher's shop. You can purchase fresh meat from there. No hunting required at all - oh, well. Not for me, at least, and others like me who live in the city. There are some who do still hunt, but it's mostly for sport now."

She regarded the butcher's shop with an impassive expression on her face. "You live very strangely in Scotland. I do not understand it."

Goodsir huffed a soft note of amusement. Hunting for sport and not survival. The concept had to be as alien as the surface of the moon - just as distant as he had thought of Edinburgh from Nunavut. "It's alright. I might say the same of you."

Glancing sidelong at him, Silna did not reply for a long moment. Then, quietly, she said, "You must think my people very uncivilized, in comparison to yours."

" _No_." All his gentle mirth drained away in an instant; he swung around to face her, heart suddenly in his throat just as it had been when they were forced to part ways, the expression on his own face just as painfully earnest as it was then. The pedestrians on the street continued to pass them as if they did not exist. "I don't think that at all. You are _different_ , but _no less_ civilized. I think -"

And the bile curdled in his gut, remembering all he had bore witness to in the Arctic, the slow and grinding breakdown of order and class and morals. The loss of any semblance of human decency. Survival at the cost of one's own soul. All of them, all the men of the expedition, products of the supposedly _superior_ empire he and Silna now found themselves stood in the heart of, representatives of the supposedly _superior_ civilization... reduced to even less than the so-called savage races they looked down upon.

"- I think you must be _more_ civilized than us," he finished weakly. "Look at what we became in the absence of all this."

Silna regarded him in silence for several beats, face still impassive as it almost always was; her eyes, however, had softened into a sad sort of kindness and - dare he think it - affection.

"You are a good man, Harry Goodsir," she said, placing her hand lightly on his chest.

Suddenly, she was the only thing in the whole entire world that mattered.

"I tried to be. I tried my best." He wanted to look away, in shame, but now his eyes seemed to be tethered to hers by an invisible string. The rope with which one tossed a life ring to a drowning man, perhaps. And it _hurt_. He didn't deserve any of the kindness _or_ the affection he saw there. ( _He didn't deserve her trust_ _ **or**_ _her regard._ ) Not after he had betrayed his entire sense of self in what he had done to William Gibson.

(They weren't really in Edinburgh, were they? He wasn't safely home, and Silna wasn't there with him. They never would be.)

"But my best wasn't good enough." His heart was beating very fast, hammering against his ribs, all the self-hatred he had been too numb to truly feel before now clamoring to be let out. "My best didn't matter. It made no difference at all."

"It mattered to me," Silna replied. "It made all the difference in the world."

And she smiled, very slightly. Goodsir felt like his rib cage was cracking open of its own accord.

"Even if you only helped one person — if you only saved one person," she continued, "does that not hold any meaning for you?"

He sniffed a laugh again, utterly devoid of sound and humor this time. "You never truly needed my help. You never needed saving."

"No," she agreed readily. "But you do."

Goodsir opened his eyes to darkness, and the sound of wind beating at the canvas walls of the tent. It was enough like being suspended inside an enormous beating heart — and he was as warm as if he were contained within some giant being's chest cavity — that for a moment he was supremely disorientated. Then a little bit more awareness trickled back into his consciousness, and he remembered where he was. _Not_ in Edinburgh. (Of course not.) He was, as ever, still on King William Island. Surrounded not by the familiar streets of home but by miles and miles of nothing but Arctic shale. Breathing in Arctic air, under an Arctic moon (the same as an Edinburgh moon, but it never felt that way) -

...no, he was breathing in Silna's hair. Even more so than when he'd closed his eyes; she'd nuzzled a bit closer against his shoulder, and his head had lolled fully to the right, while they slept. Her hand was still laid on his arm, but now _her_ arm was crooked to nestle in the space between his arm and his side. And he was fairly certain the light spot of pressure against his thigh was one of her knees.

He wasn't bothered.

The concept of physical contact with a fully naked woman was, he found, slightly easier to digest when one's mind was fogged over with sleep.

Idly, breathing slowly in and out, he wondered what had woken him. The wind? The stiffness in his neck, perhaps. (Carefully, so as not to disturb Silna, he turned his head back straight, and tried not to wince at the protesting ligaments and tendons.) Or the pain in his injured shoulder: a deep, pulsating knot of heat in the vicinity of the joint, gently throbbing in time with the beat of his heart. Maybe the warmth? He _was_ incredibly warm - almost uncomfortably so, in fact, beneath the fur blanket. His long johns were starting to stick to his legs, his feet felt damp in their socks, and there was a trickle of perspiration forming where his arm in its sling was resting against his stomach. Goodsir hadn't been so uniformly _warm_ since… well, since that last summer before the expedition set sail. Not even his bunk on the _Erebus_ had been so toasty.

Silna's disrobing was beginning to make a great deal of sense, in retrospect.

It wasn't so embarrassing now, sharing his bed with her while she was undressed. He was simply grateful for the companionship. After three hellishly long months of intentionally isolating himself from the rest of Hickey's band, and the gnawing _loneliness_ giving way to numb _emptiness_ … knowing she wasn't averse to physical closeness… it was startlingly easy to imagine rolling onto his side and gathering her against his chest, the way a child might clutch at a favorite toy as they slept. He might have even actually done it, were it not for his shoulder, and not wanting to disturb her.

 _I don't want to disturb you… please don't go_ …

His thoughts, only half-conscious at most, were already drifting again; the excess of warmth was ultimately a very minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.

 _...stay with us… I'll talk to the men and… and make it safe for you…_

 _...we owe you that…_

 _...I..._

 _...I can't go on alone…_

There were clouds in the sky now, great billowy white ones, scudding across the horizon. ( _and shirts like billowy clouds_ ) The breeze was just as gentle as it had been in Edinburgh, and carried with it not the odor of the city, but the tang of salt. Goodsir was sitting in the grass on a low hill above a narrow crescent of sandy beach, watching the waves roll in against the rocky outcrops that bordered it, contentment on his face and in his heart. This place was as familiar to him as the back of his own hand, and dear beyond measure; even more so than Edinburgh could or would ever be, it was _home_.

"I like it better here," Silna said.

He looked aside at her. She was sat to his right, weaving long stalks of grass and wildflowers into a braid. As she worked, her eyes kept returning to the vista before them, squinting in the sunlight. Her summer parka still looked out of place, albeit less so than it had in the city, and yet she seemed more… at ease, somehow. A bit more like she _belonged_ there. Goodsir wasn't at all surprised. They were surrounded by the natural world, a stone's throw from the sea; it might not be _her_ natural world or _her_ sea but it was still the kind of environment she was familiar with. She could fit into it much more easily than she could a city street made of cobblestones and dusted in coal.

"We call it the Firth of Forth," he replied, indicating the expanse of water with a slight tilt of his head. "The Romans called it _Bodotria_." A quiet sniff of amusement and a small, self-deprecating smile. "I gave that name to a new genus of crustacea I discovered in it."

 _Bodotria arenosa_. A suitable name for a tiny creature found in the sandy banks of the Firth of Forth. He had thought himself quite clever.

"And this?" Silna asked, indicating the general vicinity of their patch of grass.

"Billow Ness." Goodsir's smile turned fond. "I spent a great deal of time here as a child, with my brother John."

Silna's fingers went still, and she looked past him in the direction of the village he knew lay a short distance away down the shore. Then she focused her gaze back on him and said, thoughtfully, "This is the place of your birth, then. _This_ is your home."

He nodded. "It is." Or as much as one's place of birth could still be called _home_ when you no longer lived there, anyway.

"What is your name for it?"

"Anstruther. Fifeshire."

She repeated the names, slowly, like she had done before with _Edinburgh_ \- funny how he could remember that, he didn't usually recall much of his dreams - gaze traveling over the Firth, and the beach below their hilltop, and the arc of grass and rocks and sand leading to the village, as if she were seeing it all with new eyes. He wondered how the revelation that he had been born and raised here made it look any different to her.

"It is beautiful," she said quietly, at length.

The sight of her - sitting comfortably in the thick grass as if she _did_ belong there, Scottish wildflowers twined in her hands, the afternoon sun making a halo of the errant wisps of hair fluttering about her face - seized a sudden hold on his heart, with an ache so strong it made him catch his breath. But out of what emotion, it was difficult to say.

 _And her…?_

 _This place is beautiful to me, even now._

 _...this place is her home…_

 _ **This**_ _is your home._

Goodsir blinked, and neither Silna nor the Scottish countryside vanished like so much smoke into a winter sky, leaving him alone in a gray void, as he had abruptly feared they would. Fear? How odd. For a fraction of a moment - he had almost thought - but no. Not a variant of affection, then. She merely made a lovely tableau he would hate to see go. Tentatively, he tried to resume breathing. _Fear. Odd._ "There is no land more so," he replied. "I would be a sorry son of Scotland if I professed otherwise, but I do truly believe it."

She was looking down now at the braided flowers still in her lap, which she had deftly finished into a crown while he was speaking. After a beat, she held it out to him.

"You see beauty everywhere, in everything," she said, as he accepted the flower crown and carefully turned it about in his hands, inspecting it. Celandine, heather, sea pink, oysterplant. Not all of them were immediately at hand, not where they were sitting. How - where - had she acquired them? "I admire that about you, Harry Goodsir."

He couldn't help himself - the tips of his ears blushed scarlet, as his lips quirked in a pleased little smile. "I wish you'd call me Harry."

 _I might just call you doctor_.

(Dr. MacDonald had said that. Dr. MacDonald hadn't seen what he had become. Dr. MacDonald wasn't here. He was -

\- he was -

" _I should be going too, only I don't know if Dr. Peddie's gone to Terror or Erebus. I didn't see him to ask."_

" _Captain… I heard Tom Hartnell say we lost Dr. Peddie as well."_ )

Goodsir's smile faltered at the unwelcome intrusion of memory; in an attempt to hide his twinge of disquiet, he delicately balanced the flower crown on the tips of his fingers and and lifted it to place on top of Silna's head. (He had too much hair for such things. And flowers suited her far more than they did him.) "There," he said, before she could say anything in reply. "Beauty for beauty."

His old friend Edward Forbes would be _laughing_ , to hear him make such a pronouncement. But he meant it sincerely. Of _course_ Silna was beautiful. Why wouldn't she be? Just because she wasn't English, or fair-skinned, or _civilized_ , didn't mean -

Unlike him, Silna did not blush. She simply smiled, and for a moment that seemed to suspend itself between heartbeats, they were both smiling at each other and nothing else needed saying out loud.

He found himself wondering if he ought to reevaluate the conclusion that he'd just caught his breath _only_ out of a sudden and illogical fear. _Odd_.

Then she got to her feet and the moment was over. "Are you ready to leave?"

"Leave?" He frowned up at her. He hadn't been planning on leaving their relaxing spot for some time. There was still plenty of light left in the day, and nothing else that needed doing. "I don't follow. Are you taking me somewhere?"

She looked toward the sea, and said, "Home."

Goodsir's frown deepened. "We _are_ home. I mean - _I_ am."

"Not yet." This time, when Silna turned to him, her smile was also gone, and her eyes had taken on an almost sorrowful cast. "You have to survive first."

And she began to walk away, down the slope of the hill towards the crescent of sandy beach below, where the water had suddenly gone dark and abnormally still.

The twinge of disquiet came back as a sharp pang, curling around the pervading contentment in his heart and pushing in roots there; Goodsir scrambled to his feet and hurried after her. The breeze was picking up, and the temperature was dropping, while the sun turned from gold to silver. By the time Silna reached the sand, the ground had become an unending spread of flinty, gravelly rocks, and he could see the heat of his breath in the air. The water was now thick with pancake ice. And instead of the distant Lothian shore across the Firth, there was a looming tower of a landmass that resembled, rather disturbingly, Beechey Island.

How had they traveled so far in only a handful of meters?

Silna didn't stop when she reached the water; she stepped right out onto one of the disks of ice, then another. Incredibly, they supported her weight, bobbing gently in place.

"I - I don't -"

Goodsir was gasping for breath as he stumbled to a halt at the water's edge, and not just from the burst of exertion. Dread had his entire chest in a vise now - dread, and fear, and the creeping realization that _he must still be dreaming_. He wasn't in Anstruther. He wasn't in Edinburgh. He wasn't in Scotland, period. He was still lost in the Arctic, and Silna was crossing the ice without him - leaving - going back to her life, her people, _her_ home - he would never see _his_ home again -

"Wait!" he blurted, and once more did not have it within him to feel ashamed at the amount of despair coloring the plea. But she was already turning around to face him again, now dressed in her heavy furs. When he looked down at himself, he was (inexplicably) in full officer's dress, complete with Welsh wig, cap, greatcoat, muffler, and half-mittens.

"I am not leaving you," she said. "I will not leave you and Aglooka to die. I will see you safely home. But you must allow me to. I cannot lead you if you will not follow."

He was struck by the strangest impression: that although he could still understand her perfectly, she was no longer speaking in English.

She took a step backwards, onto another circle of pancake ice that somehow did not sink beneath her weight. Goodsir flinched, an aborted, instinctive move to catch her when she fell, because the ice failed to ditch her into the sea as it rightfully ought to.

"I-I can't," he protested. "The ice won't hold me, too. It isn't possible. I - I'll drag us both down."

"Harry," she said.

He felt his heart thud to a stop, breath caught once more on an ache he was unable to assign a name or meaning.

Silna extended a mittened hand, and asked, "Do you trust me?"

(He could hear her, but her mouth was not moving.)

"Yes." There was no hesitation to his response. He absolutely trusted her. With his life, and Crozier's. And not just because she knew how to survive here, and he did not. "Yes, I do."

Without moving a single facial muscle, she replied, "Then let me guide you home."

He looked at the ice, then her hand, and then her face.

 _I lied. I_ _ **am**_ _afraid._

 _You need not be afraid any longer_. _You are not alone._

Heart hammering back to life with a roar of blood in his ears, Goodsir reached out to grasp her hand, and took a trembling step onto the first disc of pancake ice.

He opened his eyes to the absence of warmth, rather than too much of it, and in the midst of sucking in a breath of loss that felt like a physical blow to the chest: immediately awake, very conscious of where he was, yet somehow _more_ disorientated than before. Christ, he didn't want to _be_ here, he wanted to be _home_ , he wanted to be where everything was _familiar_ and _made sense_ even though he wasn't at all certain that it _was_ or _did_ anymore - but he didn't want Silna to - he didn't want her to - what _did_ he want? - he'd wanted to hold her and never say goodbye again - but where _was_ she, she had just been right next to him, she'd said she wasn't going to leave him - he wasn't alone - _no, that was only a dream, she didn't say that, she_ _ **can't**_ _say that_ -

A hand touched his chest, palm gently pressing against the rapid beating of his heart, and he saw that Silna _was_ in fact still next to him. The difference was that she was awake now, sitting up, and - from what he could discern, in his prone position and in the dark - fully dressed again. Above her head, the sliver of sky visible between the sections of tent was just beginning to lighten with the coming dawn.

So they had slept through the night, then. Goodsir couldn't recall the last time he'd had that many hours of uninterrupted sleep, and _deep_ sleep at that. He didn't think it was customary for Silna to sleep for so long, and yet she had stayed anyway.

 _You are not alone._

Drawing in another, slower breath, he swallowed past the aborted sense of panic and despair choking his throat, and reached up to cover her hand with his own. (On his bare chest, he realized, belatedly. She had folded the fur blanket down. But that was fine. He still wasn't bothered. Once again, gratitude for the contact was overriding what remained of his sense of propriety.) If her expression changed at all, he could not see it; after a moment, she lightly patted his chest, once, and withdrew her hand. Then she got to her feet and moved away

\- _Leave? I don't follow_ -

to undo the flap at the tent's entrance, carefully and quietly drawing it back and securing it. Settling down on her haunches, she turned so she was silhouetted against what little pre-dawn light there was to be had, and after waiting to be certain he was watching her - where else would he look? They had no other means by which to communicate, and she clearly had something to say - pantomimed throwing something, then raising something to her mouth.

Eating? Food. Throwing something? Or slashing with something? Either way - hunting. She was going out to hunt for food. It seemed a reasonable interpretation, seeing as there was no food to be had here in the camp. He didn't want her to go, not with his newly-acquired and utterly pathetic fear of being left alone, but… needs must. When Silna came back to his side to peer closely at him, trying to ascertain whether or not he had caught her meaning, he nodded.

"Be safe," he whispered hoarsely.

(He had said that to her, once. She had seemed to understand him then. Maybe she would now.)

She might have smiled, just a little. It was next to impossible to tell. Then she touched his chest again, as if urging him to remain where he was; stood, and left the tent. Goodsir could hear her footsteps crunching on the rocks outside, soon accompanied by the rustle of her sled, both receding into the distance until the only sound was once more that of the wind beating against the canvas walls.


End file.
